"There is no architecture and no build-up. Just a vivid, uninterrupted succession of colors, rhythms and moods." —Arnold Schoenberg describing his Five Pieces For Orchestra in a letter to Richard Strauss, 1909, quoted in The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)

Miles Davis
The Complete On The Corner Sessions
Sony-Legacy Music
2007

The music that trumpeter Miles Davis forged in the first half of the 1970s, his so-called “electric period,” is not jazz. In a determined effort to keep his sound fresh, Davis took the audacious step of leaving behind all the frameworks of the art form which had made him a recognized figure throughout the world.

To open himself up to new ideas and to expand his audience, his new sound appropriates styles of music from outside the jazz canon, namely the propulsive dance groove of funk (particularly James Brown and Sly Stone), the raucous, rough-edged, electro-charged brashness of Jimi Hendrix, the metallic sparkle of India’s Ravi Shankar, the European classical avant-garde methods of Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as from the traditions of jazz going back to Dixieland and ragtime. In the raw, wailing of the soloing, it is also indebted to the free playing of saxophonists Albert Ayler, and late John Coltrane with Pharoah Sanders.

And what does this add up to? The music Davis made in these years—with the scorching electric guitars of Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, grounded in the steady, incantory pulse of Al Foster’s 4/4 rhythm on drums and Michael Henderson’s unswerving defining of tempo and key via electric bass—assaults with unfamiliar gestures and strays beyond bar measures to dig deep into emotional recesses never before expressed so vividly. The music was so far ahead of its time, that we’re still catching up to it nearly 40 years later.

The Complete On The Corner Sessions is the eighth and final set in a series of Miles Davis boxes. This six-CD package includes six-plus hours of music, including tracks that would be used for the LPs On the Corner (Columbia, 1972), Get Up With It (Columbia, 1974), and Big Fun (Columbia, 1974). In addition, the package includes 12 previously unissued tracks, plus five tracks previously unissued in full, and contains a 120-page booklet with liner notes and essays by musician/co-producer Bob Belden (Michael Cuscuna is the other co-producer), journalist Tom Terrell and arranger/musician Paul Buckmaster.

The Complete On The Corner Sessions is an inaccurate and misleading title in an academic sense. The tracks presented in this set, recorded at Columbia Studio B in New York City over the course of 16 sessions from March 9, 1972-May 5, 1975, offer up at least two very different artistic intentions.

The first is the material (recorded on June 1 and 6, 1972) that would be released as On The Corner—the extended grooves, as bassist Michael Henderson explains in the liner notes.

Other tracks collected here are another matter. Following the two June 1972 sessions, Davis moved the ensemble sound away from an insistence on a churning, full-speed-ahead jam on one chord. Over the next few years, orchestral colors are explored and there’s room for chord changes and melodies.

Perhaps it’s quibbling, but I’m more comfortable with distinguishing each of the original LPs as distinct periods, or moments, in Davis’ continuous evolution.

The new solo

In the early 1970s, Davis could not play trumpet with the intensity, force and bravado he’d exhibited throughout his career, and which had been at a peak in 1969 and 1970 as he put himself on display to a whole new audience of rock crowds at the Fillmore East (March 6-7, 1970 and again June 17-20, 1970) and Fillmore West (April 10-11, 1970 and again October 15-18, 1970), at huge rock festivals (Isle of Wight, August 29, 1970) and other venues larger than the night clubs and corner bars he’d been playing for decades.

His embouchure was compromised. He was in ill health. His use of recreational drugs was reportedly abundant. Playing trumpet is physically demanding and Davis, in the 1970s, was willing, but his body was just not near the same levels as it had been. His soloing and his steering of the ensemble sound via his horn is diminished from the heights of his earlier career.

But what he lacked in physical stamina, he made up for by taking huge risks in exposing his every vulnerability via a shift in musical intention. He refused to rely on playing crowd favorites or tunes from his past repertoire. He was intent on making something entirely brand new, of presenting something that hadn’t been seen or heard before.